Matter Smart Home Standard Still Looks Immaterial At Retail

Six months after surfacing at CES as a smart home highlight and nine months after its 1.0 release, the Matter standard for connected devices remains so submerged at retail that it might as well not exist. 

Search on Amazon for a smart lock, and the navigational rail at the left of the page will let you narrow your selection of a “Controller Type” to Amazon’s own Alexa, Apple’s HomeKit, and Google Assistant—not to mention much less obvious contenders such as IFTTT, Nexia, and Wink. But Matter? It would appear that Amazon’s never heard of it.

A similar situation awaits Best Buy shoppers. Jump to the smart thermostats page on the retailer’s site and you’ll see a “Works With” filter at the left that includes Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Assistant—and although this list is comprehensive enough to include Microsoft’s discontinued Cortana, Matter doesn’t seem to, well, matter. 

And in a Best Buy brick-and-mortar retail location in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., the works-with labels on store shelves below specific products didn’t mention Matter either. Customers who see the Matter logo (it looks like three blunted arrows pointed at each other) on an individual gadget’s box and don’t recognize the graphic would have to look up its meaning themselves. 

“Matter awareness at the retail level is shockingly low,” emailed Mark Vena, CEO and principal analyst at SmartTech Research(Opens in a new window).

“I thought we would be further ahead from a visibility perspective,” said Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies(Opens in a new window). “The attention is somewhere else.” 

Ted Miller, a spokesman for the Connectivity Standards Alliance(Opens in a new window), said that the industry group governing this internet-of-things standard had put together and shared a retailer toolkit this spring and was working on further coaching for retailers about how they should highlight Matter on their sites and in physical stores.

“It’s then on each retailer individually,” he said.

Miller also pointed to such recent advances as the May release of a 1.1 version(Opens in a new window), designed to work better with battery-powered sensors that don’t continuously talk to a smart home hub, and the addition of 60 new companies to a list of 600-plus members(Opens in a new window) that already includes such top-tier firms as Amazon, Apple, Google, LG, and Samsung. 

The one company to both ship its own smart home devices and sell almost everybody else’s, Amazon, shared a link to a Matter landing page(Opens in a new window) that endorses its own personal assistant—“Alexa makes Matter even better”—but also said it would add Matter to those search filters once more devices supporting it enter the market. 

Best Buy did not respond to a query emailed to its press department. 

Both Vena and Milanesi suggested that the CSA’s status as a standards group underwritten by members left it with little leverage. 

“Looking back at this, the awareness issue is probably not a total surprise as the Connectivity Standards Alliance is a not-for-profit standards organization that depends on its members to do the heavy lifting around awareness building,” Vena said. 

“I think that we are in a situation where they created something good but they now need more marketing muscle but they don’t have that,” Milanesi agreed. “And this is sometimes what happens with alliances and committees that are non profit.”

CSA’s site does not have a searchable list of Matter-compliant devices; the organization’s publicist suggested “matter-smarthome,”(Opens in a new window) a database maintained by a German smart home blog(Opens in a new window).

A Back Door to the Smart Home

New gadget sales aren’t the only way Matter can get into people’s homes: Smart home device vendors can add Matter support through software updates. Amazon and Google(Opens in a new window) each announced Matter support in December, and have been delivering it since through device updates (which on the Nest devices in one PCMag editor’s house last week had them offline for roughly 20 minutes for the installation process); in May, Amazon announced that its own updates had brought Matter support to more than 100 million Echo devices(Opens in a new window). But that doesn’t mean that any of these newly-upgraded devices will advertise their new capabilities.

“My Alexa app, which is where most of the stuff is, hasn’t told me about Matter,” Milanesi said. “There’s the retail part, and then there’s the discoverability part within apps.”

(At that point in our call, a nearby Alexa device in her house started talking back, its software deciding that the world “Alexa” meant its assistance had just been invoked.) 

Milanesi added that although Matter is supposed to allow people to consolidate the number of apps they need to corral their smart home herd, she’s yet to be able to uninstall any apps—too many lights and switches aren’t yet Matter compliant.

Both tech analysts offered similar advice to both the CSA and smart home retailers: emphasize the security requirements(Opens in a new window) in the Matter standard and how they can reduce the odds of a “smart” home looking dumb after attackers crack a too-simple device password or trick a gadget into running their own code.  

For example, Matter devices must encrypt communication between them to ensure that they work safely even on an untrusted network—as a CSA document(Opens in a new window) (PDF) explains, “it does not rely on the security of the communication technologies on top of which Matter runs.” Matter devices must also authenticate themselves via digital certificates signed by third-party authorities and support over-the-air updates that are themselves digitally signed.

“For consumers who are aware of Matter, the chief benefit they hear about is the ability to use a smart home device with any digital voice assistant,” Vena wrote. “But most consumers don’t understand that Matter is also about a baseline security level that is part of the Matter certification spec and process.”

Milanesi called focusing on security “super-smart” but warned that preaching about it may not resonate with the unconverted: “Explaining security is never easy, though, especially if it’s something that consumers are not thinking about yet.” 

For those customers, the next meaningful smart home security upgrade may not happen until they buy a new round of devices—and those gadgets probably will support Matter, even if they don’t realize it.